These resources are intended to help guide students and faculty in avoiding, preventing, and detecting plagiarism.  Additional assistance with any of these resources or with plagiarism-related strategies is available from Betsy Harper, Tech Library reference librarian (eharper@mtech.edu; 496-4523) or Dr. Henrietta Shirk, chair of Tech's Professional & Technical Communication department (hshirk@mtech.edu; 496-4297).   

Any suspected plagiarism should be reported to Susan Patton, vice-chancellor for Academic Affairs.  Get your facts together, formulate a preliminary recommendation, and check your information.   If you charge a student with plagiarism, first meet with the student and then follow with the appropriate procedures. 

How does plagiarism occur?
Plagiarism can be inadvertent or blatant.  Inadvertent plagiarism occurs when a student innocently copies without giving credit; usually it is regarded as a mistake in writing.  If a student has been informed of Tech's plagiarism policy and has had training in how to correctly cite and give credit to others, inadvertent plagiarism is nearly impossible.  Blatant plagiarism occurs when a student deliberately copies the material of others, whether published or unpublished.  It is a form of deliberate cheating, and the penalties for this kind of plagiarism are outlined in the Tech plagiarism policy.  

Avoiding plagiarism  
There are many strategies to help educators to prevent and students  to avoid plagiarism by using teaching methods, assignments, and proper crediting of sources. 

• Cite sources, whether within the paper, in footnotes, endnotes, a works-cited list or a bibliography
• Paraphrase accurately and completely-- for information, tips, and examples please take a look at our handout How to Recognize Unacceptable and Acceptable Paraphrases.
• Relate plagiarism to documentation (citation) standards-- e.g. APA, MLA, ACS, Turabian.
• Provide information on the class syllabus about departmental and university plagiarism policies.  Below is an example of a statement that can be included on a syllabus:

"A student will be considered guilty of academic dishonesty if he or she submits a term paper, essay, speech, laboratory report, or other assignment in which all or part of the words or ideas are copied from the published or unpublished work of another individual without giving the original author proper credit for the words or ideas."  --Montana Tech Student Handbook, 2002-2003

Avoiding plagiarism:  Students

Give credit where credit is due 
There are many ways to legitimately incorporate the words and opinions of others into a piece of writing.  Paraphrasing and quotations are the best ways; but with any method, credit needs to be given to the original author or speaker. Knowing when to credit a source is vital to research.  In the following situations, always give credit to the source or person:

• Using another person's idea, opinion or theory
• Using any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings-- any piece of information-- that are not common knowledge
• Quotations of another person's actual spoken or written words; or
• Paraphrase of another person's actual spoken or written words

And when in doubt, a source should be credited-- err on the side of too many sources rather than omitting credit to a person or source. 

In addition to giving due credit, check the material being used.  Even if a source is credited, the use can still be questionable.  

• To avoid plagiarizing, check paraphrasing very carefully.  Make sure that it is clear that it is a paraphrase of another's words by use of quotations marks and citations. 
• Manage sources carefully.  Check to make sure not too much of one source is used, and that a careful list is kept of sources used over the course of the research and writing process.
• Credit assistants!  If someone helped in the research or writing process, that person must be credited.

For more information on paraphrasing, quotations, and correcting crediting and usage of others' materal, see the Indiana University Writing Tutorial Services' page "Plagiarism:  What It Is and How to Recognize It".

Understand the sources
Understanding the difference between primary and secondary sources is also essential.  A primary source is the original information, while a secondary source describes, interprets, analyzes or otherwise discusses the primary source. For example, in history, an example of a primary document is the Declaration of Independence; a book interpreting or describing the Declaration of Independence would be a secondary source.  In the sciences, a primary source would be the results of an experiment or a survey; an article or book describing and discussing the results of that survey would be a secondary source. 

Avoiding plagiarism:  Instructors

Students come from a wide variety of educational experiences.  Some have had extensive high school or college instruction in research, writing, and documentation, while others have had very little or no instruction at all.  It is not safe to assume that any student has had instruction about plagiarism, or that a student can even define it.  A few measures can be taken to ensure that students understand what it means to plagiarize, and what they can do to prevent doing so.

Make sure students understand Montana Tech's plagiarism policy.
In addition to including the policy in the class syllabus, a class discussion early in the semester is useful.  Students will have advance warning that instructors are aware of plagiarism, and as a result should be able to approach instructors for assistance during the semester to avoid improper documentation and crediting during the research and writing process.

Avoid a punitive approach to teaching plagiarism
Don't threaten students with instantaneous expulsion for not citing a source correctly.  Create an environment where students can ask questions and discuss plagiarism without restriction.  But make sure that students understand that teachers know about paper mills and full-text websites and that they are aware of Tech's plagiarism policies and procedures.

Make the writing process visible
Give research and writing assignments early in the semester and check in periodically.  Require a short annotated bibliography near the beginning of the research process, drafts of writing during the writing process, and a short reflection piece to be turned in with the finished assignment. 

Discuss classroom ethics
Students need to understand that academic honesty is more than a game, and that education is more than a boring process to get through.  Distinguish between collaboration and academic dishonesty in both assignments and classroom work. 

Establish professional guidelines
Emphasize that this is not just an educational, college issue; plagiarism continues to matter in professional life.  Discuss codes of conduct and copyright laws that can have an effect on professionals.   Look at the plagiarism policies of other schools, departments and programs, especially those in your field.

Create well designed assignments
Link assignments to specific learning goals, and make the relationship between the assignment and the goals clear to students.  Make sure that students can reasonably complete the assignment given the resources at Tech, including the library.  And create assignments which require both primary and secondary documents to be used-- not just consulted as part of creating a bibliography.  Require multiple deliverables-- bibliographies, copies of sources to be used, drafts, and similar products which require students to do research and create a product.  Many assignments can also have a reflection or discussion piece incorporated into them, requiring students to describe the research and writing process as well as their learning experience with the assignment.

Further Reading
Resources for Assignment Design and Understanding Plagiarism by Dr. Henrietta Shirk. 

Detecting plagiarism

Understanding where plagiarized material comes from is important.  Free term paper mills that allow students to buy or exchange papers are easy to find.  Another common source are other academics' websites-- innocently posted papers that are linked in a CV, form part of a website on outstanding students, or are part of a class assignment are all fair game.  And full-text sources at the library can be another source of plagiarized material. 

First, take a good look at the paper.  Sometimes students try to cut and paste to add material, and this creates red flags.  Points to look for include:

• Is the paper formatted correctly?  Consistently?
• Is there material or a part (or parts) of the paper which is markedly different in tone, tense, or relevance?
• Is it noticeably better or worse than the student's previous work?

Then look at the reference list.  Papers from term paper mills are often old or not college-level work, and this will show most clearly in the references or works cited list.  Sometimes students will try to use books from other libraries, thinking that the instructor will only check sources in the our library.  So look for a few obvious points:

• Are citations poorly constructed or incomplete?  Is the bibliographic style inconsistent?
• How current are the sources?  Are many older than 3-5 years old?
• Is any of the material available in the library?

Searching for the source

The next step is to begin searching.  Before you begin, create a search strategy.  Several words, phrases, or combinations of these will be useful for searching for suspect material.  Look for any of the following:

• Strange word usages, or very subject-specific terms
• Unusual words in a phrase, or misspelled words
• Odd facts or statistics

There are several places to start.  If the paper seems well-edited, much like a magazine or journal article, use the Tech Library's full-text resources.   Start with commonly used sources such as:

• InfoTrac (Collection of 19 databases; available off campus by using the URL at the bottom of this page and the barcode from your library card.)
• Wilson OmniFile Full Text Mega Edition (Full-text journal articles.)
• Encyclopedia Britannica Online
• NetLibrary (Full-text books)
• NewsBank (Full-text newspaper articles.)
• Wiley Interscience (Full-text journal articles published in Wiley journals.)
• Blackwell Synergy (Full-text journal articles published in Blackwell journals.)

For more indexes and full-text resources, see the library's Databases, Indexes & Abstracts list.  Resources which offer full text indicate this in the description of the resource.  

Also try free full-text sources.  There are two types:  government information (over 70% of the government's publications are now available in electronic format) and free magazine article sites (usually only 1-2 years' worth of articles, unlike the library databases, which often cover twenty years or more.)

• Scirus (Scientific information online.  Published by Elsevier, and leads to both free sites and to citations for Elsevier's journals.)
• First Gov (General gateway to the U. S. government online.)
• GPO Access (Legislative and regulatory information for the U. S government.)
• FindArticles.com (Full-text magazine articles from 2001-present.  Popular business, news, and household / beauty  titles.)
• MagPortal.com (Like FindArticles, full-text magazine articles from 2001-present.  Popular business, news, and household / beauty titles.)
• About.com (Encyclopedia site.  Articles are written by anyone willing to do so, regardless of qualifications or experience.  Will link to sites outside About.com as well as its own content; you can remove the About.com frame to see the actual URL for the site.)

Free websites are also a good source for plagiarized material.  Using your search strategy, try your search in at least two of the better-known search engines.  

• Google (good for images, user groups, blogs and other alternative web formats)
• AltaVista (particularly for engineering, mining, geology, and similar subjects)
• AskJeeves (very popular with students; enter your query in the form of a regular question-- "How many people live in the United States?")
• Yahoo
• MSN

If you see a continuing problem with plagiarism, or you're not comfortable doing this kind of searching, you can subscribe to a plagiarism detection service.  

TurnItIn  This site is very popular with academic institutions.  You can sign up for a free trial to see what it's like or if you only have 1-5 papers that you want to check.   Will check both free web sources as well as some subscription databases such as InfoTrac and WilsonSelect.  

EVE2 (Essay Verification Engine 2)  This service is built specifically for checking essays and similar pieces of writing.  No free trial offered; email them for more information.

Glatt Plagiarism Services This detection service requires you to pay a subscription and use a cd-rom (rather than a web-based) product.  The student's paper is entered into the software, which removes every fifth word.  Then the paper is returned to the student, who is supposed to be able to enter the missing words.  

MOSS (Measure of Software Similarity)  For software code in computer science, the computer science department at UC-Berkeley has developed this free software for detecting plagiarism in code written by students.  Registration is required to use the site and receive the software.